Q: Tell me about the activities you participated in?

Kriss: On each of the two days I was the ‘Business Facilitator’ to a group of 8-10 Year 10 students. They were tasked with designing and pitching a new mobile app that allows young people to design their own t-shirts. The end results, in addition to various target setting and planning exercises, were a logo, a 60 business pitch, and a 60 second Youtube advert.

Q: What was your role?

Kriss: I was there to support and assist students in completing the tasks. I talked them through each task that was set, seeding ideas where they began to struggle, and encouraging students with their own ideas. Together, we defined group goals and personal goals. In the second half of the day, I took on more of a chairman role, ensuring that we stayed motivated and on time whilst preparing the business pitch and Youtube advert.

Q: What did your team create?

Kriss: My first team created an app called Marvin’s Tees. The second created O.T.Tees. Both apps were fairly similar in functionality but differed in their approach to the pitch and advert, some going for funny and some going for detailed and informational. Because of the audience (i.e. the rest of the school kids) the funnier stuff worked better.

Q: What did you learn?

Kriss: Largely I was surprised at some of the ideas that the kids came out with—things that I hadn’t thought of myself—that would be particularly effective in marketing their app, such as sponsoring a non-school uniform day in order to target a 14-24 demographic.

Q: What would you like to say to people considering volunteering in schools through The Tower Hamlets Business Partnership?

Kriss: This experience definitely exceeded expectations for me and was a wholly enjoyable couple of days. I won’t pretend that all of the kids were 100% interested the whole time, or that I didn’t find it frustrating when they fell short of what I thought they’d be capable of doing, but most are genuinely interested to try and find out about what you do for a living. Give it a try!

Kriss Watt from Tobias & Tobias volunteered through Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnership http://thebp.org.uk/

Why are forms such a chore? Designers from multiple industries have been trying to solve this problem for decades. Indeed, every layer of the experience when we use a computerised form has been meticulously crafted to reduce our stress – from the ergonomics of the keyboard & mouse to interaction components like dropdowns, radio buttons and auto-completed text fields. But the fact remains that they’re a stressful part of our everyday lives.

A recent example of design being used to ease the pain of forms is Funnel, a survey tool for iOS and Android.

Using Funnel for customer satisfaction surveys

Funnel uses an approach designers commonly take to the form problem, which is to make the process feel more fun and playful in the hope that users will warm to it. What’s the rationale behind this approach? Is it really more fun to fill out forms that are designed like this?

Making traditional form interactions look nicer

The interaction models are pretty conventional, just designed in a way that makes them less intimidating (assuming you aren’t intimidated by large smiley faces, of course). While this layer of design might be dismissed as superficial by people who focus on functionality, it definitely matters. The visual layer provides users with a subconscious cue as to the type of activity they’re about to undertake, and this will in turn affect their emotional state as they embark upon the activity.

Imagine two different signup forms, both asking for the same set of personal information, except one has been designed for a mortgage application process and the other for a music-oriented social networking site. They might even use the same set of interaction models – dropdowns, calendars, radio buttons – but we’d be surprised if the visual execution was identical. The mortgage provider should use visual design to convey an appropriate level of seriousness; after all, entering the wrong information may lead to rejection, or might count as fraud in extreme cases. However, this level of seriousness would seem oddly intimidating in the case of the social networking site.

Guess which one of these forms is a mortgage application

But is it enough to focus purely on the visual execution of forms, as Funnel seems to do, if we want to make them less painful? The visual, aesthetic layer design is slightly problematic in that it’s very culturally sensitive. A design that suggests playful informality in one part of the world might seem downright childish in another. This layer is also very subject to changing trends – a visual style that seems contemporary one year might become dated and corny very quickly. So perhaps it’s time to tackle the problem of forms at a deeper layer than purely visual design.

What are forms for? To gather information from users. Do we always need highly specific and granular data? No. Are we still dependent on keyboard, mouse and touch inputs? No. Can new devices and the data they can gather fundamentally change the form-completion process? Maybe.

Imagine a mobile form that works like a theremin, where the user lifts their device to change the value of a field, or tilts the phone to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Imagine a restaurant whose mobile app gathers feedback not with a slider, but by having customers express themselves with a smile or grimace and then taking a photo and algorithmically “scoring” their satisfaction. Imagine a rail company using location data to invoke a customer satisfaction survey when a journey ends, referring to timetable data to work out if the train was late and pre-populating the form as appropriate.

Some of these ideas may be less far-fetched than they sound at first. For example, the Happy Things project for Mac OS detects when you smile and automatically takes a picture of your face. It’s becoming easier for software to gauge our emotions as well as our location.

There’s a lot of scope for innovation in the way systems gather input from users, especially where mobile devices with richer contextual awareness are concerned. The process can become more powerful as well as more playful, as long as we continue to challenge ourselves as an industry and as designers. Why not exploit these capabilities instead of – or as well as – making checkboxes feel nicer?

Some extensive googling led me to this extremely useful post on Labnol, where I learnt about how to use the ImportXML function in Google Spreadsheets. Before too long I’d cracked my problem. In this post I’m going to explain how you can do it too.

Data you can extract from Twitter

This walkthrough will teach you how to extract two types of Twitter data using Google Spreadsheets – tweets and links.

Tweets are extracted using the Twitter Search API in conjunction with ImportFeed. This allows Twitter search results to be extracted into a spreadsheet format.

Links are extracted using the Backtweets API in conjunction with ImportXML. The Backtweets API allows you to find any links posted on Twitter even if they’ve been shortened using services like bit.ly or tinyurl.

I’m in a hurry, can I just do this right now?

If you just want to do it – instead of learn how to do it – just open this Google spreadsheet I’ve created.  You’ll need to make your own local copy so you can edit it. Instructions can be found in the spreadsheet itself.

How to extract tweets containing links

The instructions below will help you create a Google Spreadsheet that pulls in and displays the time, username and text of all tweets containing links to a specified page. Because it uses Backtweets, these tweets will be retrieved even if they used shortened URLs from services like bit.ly or tinyurl.

1. Create a new spreadsheet in Google Documents.
2. Enter column labels in this order: “Search criteria”, “Timestamp”, “Username” and “Tweet text” in cells A1 to D1.
3. In cell B2, underneath Timestamp, insert the following formula:
   

   =ImportXML(“http://backtweets.com/search.xml?itemsperpage=100&since_id=1255588696&key=key&q=”&A2,”//tweet_created_at”)

4. In cell C2, underneath Username, insert the following formula:
   

   =ImportXML(“http://backtweets.com/search.xml?itemsperpage=100&since_id=1255588696&key=key&q=”&A2,”//tweet_from_user”)

5. In cell D2, underneath Tweet Text, insert the following formula:
   

   =ImportXML(“http://backtweets.com/search.xml?itemsperpage=100&since_id=1255588696&key=key&q=”&A2,”//tweet_text”)

6. Now paste a search query into cell A2 – say, http://www.google.com. After a few seconds, you should see columns B, C and D fill up with tweets, looking something like the image below:



7. The formulas pasted into cells B2, C2 and D2 all reference the URL in cell A2. This means that whenever you paste anything new into A2, the search results should refresh.
8. Also, you can paste parts of URLs into A2 – not just entire ones. This is useful for seeing all links to a specific directory on your site, for example.

Finally, this tool can only extract 100 results at a time – but it is possible to set it up to retrieve more than that. Look at my sample Google Spreadsheet if you want to do this.

Extracting tweets from Twitter search results

The method for doing this is identical to the above, but uses the ImportFeed function instead of ImportXML.

1. Create a new spreadsheet in Google Documents.
2. Enter column labels in this order: “Search criteria”, “Timestamp”, “Username” and “Tweet text”. For the rest of this walkthrough, I’m going to assume that these labels are in cells A1 to D1, but in reality you can put them wherever you like
3. In cell B2, underneath Timestamp, insert the following formula:
   

   =ImportFeed(“http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?rpp=20&page=1&q=”&A2, “items created”)

4. In cell C2, underneath Username, insert the following formula:
   

   =ImportFeed(“http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?rpp=20&page=1&q=”&A2, “items author”)

5. In cell D2, underneath Tweet Text, insert the following formula:
   

   =ImportFeed(“http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?rpp=20&page=1&q=”&A2, “items title”)

6. Type a search query into cell A2 – say, “Hoth.” Hit enter and the results will load. It should look something like this:
7. Things will go wrong if you insert characters like # or @ into the search query. To get around this, type %23 instead of # and %40 instead of @. This will allow you to search for hash tags and usernames.

I haven’t been successful in generating more than 20 search results per request, but you can get around this using the page number parameter in the ImportFeed query string. See my own Google spreadsheet to find out how to do this.

I hope these instructions are useful – if you have any comments, questions or feedback, please let me know in the comments.